Back to the Future of Social Media: Hunting and Gathering has its Benefits!

So much can happen in a day. Heck, so much can happen in an hour! I spend much of my day trying to stay informed. I’m looking at multiple news sources, keeping an eye on LinkedIn and Facebook, reading blogs and generally missing loads and loads of relevant information.

To solve this problem, I predict that the future of social media will involve a tremendous emphasis on automated hunting, gathering, filtering and delivering of information.

There’s evidence that this prediction may be coming to fruition. Just this week, LinkedIn announced that it was joining with Newsle. Here’s how the announcement arrived in my newsfeed.

There was a button at the bottom of the announcement that spoke directly to my needs and I dug a little deeper:

For the last three years, Newsle has leveraged its disambiguation, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to build an extremely compelling product that finds blogs and articles that mention you or anyone you care about – colleagues, bosses, industry thought leaders, etc. – and notifies you seconds after they’ve published… said LinkedIn head of content products Ryan Roslansky in a blog post.

I realise that Newsle isn’t new, but it now has a massive parent company with a huge megaphone. The future of social media will be driven by the BIG companies acquiring and shedding light on the already existing applications that solve everyday problems.

Now that Newsle is suddenly elevated and brought to my attention, I figured it was time to try it for myself:

Lessons for Others:

Congratulations, you have likely done the hard work already. If you have spent the time to build a network on LinkedIn or Facebook you can now start to explore the additional offerings these companies are sending to you.

If you find you are missing important news on your clients or the companies you are looking to do business with, consider following the steps in my Newsle video above.

Also, if you are like me, just be conscious of the problems that arise in your day-to-day business life. When an opportunity by a company you trust is pushed to you, consider jumping in and using the new tools.